Trayectoria de Manuel Bilbao

The real world application of oral tasks (situational authenticity) was an important criterion in teachers’ rationales. Oral tasks, according to them, should allow for

made explicit reference to this aspect of oral tasks. The following comments are representative:

(5) Later in life students should be able to speak, to communicate in English in their future jobs or future studies. The real world application can motivate students to work.(511E)

(6) I often adapt textbook tasks or use my own tasks. I tend not to use tasks that are not practical, not ‘real world’. What I pay particular attention to is the real world application of the task into students’ future life. For example, in this lesson, instead of using the textbook task, which involves students working out a summary of the listening passage in pairs, I asked students to do role-playing, that is, one is a job candidate, and the other an employer. Students will be able to experience what a job interview is like. I want students to prepare this in advance because later in their life, they will have to apply for a job any way, for example in a foreign company, this experience is preparing them for future use of English. Practical tasks engage students more than ‘far away’ tasks. (812H) Teacher perceptions of the need for a practical or real world feature of oral tasks make sense in an EFL teaching environment where students might not see the relevance of communicative tasks (e.g., Bock, 2000; McDonough, 2004; Pham, 2007), unless they are obviously related to their future jobs or future studies or pursuits (McDonough & Chaikitmongkol, 2007). Unlike the four teachers in Andon and Eckerth’s (2009) ESL study, who used tasks with both situational and interactional authenticity, the teachers in the current study showed a strong preference for tasks with situational authenticity (rather than interactional authenticity).

In the search for engagement, the teachers also emphasised relevance through personalizing the tasks, connecting them to students’ current lives. The nine case teachers referred frequently to this aspect in the interviews:

(7) Tasks, importantly, should be real to students; students are not going to engage themselves in any task you ask them to do, but they are in tasks that are relevant to them.… In real life, this issue (job choices) often causes tensions between

parents and children of this age. I think my own task would engage my students better, because this issue of debate reflects their immediate concerns. (712G)

(8) This task does not make good sense to students. Although students have a chance to talk about themselves, this second task, deciding on the best seats for themselves on a given boat plan is not worth discussing. First, students rarely go by boat. Second, our students usually don’t care about where to sit, except maybe some seasick students, but students of this kind, not many, may be one or two, so it’s not real to ask students to do this task. Because if you ask them to, they still do it, but not engagingly or wholeheartedly, I assume. (310C)

(9) Confronted with each textbook topic and associated tasks, I always consider whether I can make it better for my students or not and how. Personalizing the tasks, bringing it closer to student life is what I often do. How students do a given task all depends on whether it is relevant or interesting to them or not. (210B) These comments reflect the view (Samuda & Bygate, 2008) that tasks need to address “personal relevance and learners’ own experience as catalysts for learning” (p.221) (also see Willis & Willis, 2007). The teachers’ choice of tasks emphasises learner motivation and engagement, which is central to Dogme principles in ELT teaching (Meddings & Thornbury, 2003; Thornbury, 2012). Interestingly, while Long (2005, 2007; Long & Crookes, 1992) strongly advocates for a needs analysis based on “the real world target tasks learners are preparing to undertake” (Long & Crookes, 1992, p.44) as the

foundation for selecting pedagogic tasks, the teachers did not carry out any formal needs analysis, given that they had to follow the top-down mandated textbooks. They instead, drawing on their strong learner orientation and understanding of what tasks could best engage students, changed or replaced design features of textbook tasks, to induce engaging processes that they believed conducive to maximal output in the target language. In this regard, task authenticity refers to how learners respond when doing the task rather than whether the task occurs in the real world or not (Skehan, 2003, p.3).

Taken together, in this EFL context, the teachers’ observed practice and reasoning are most accurately summed up by the notion of ‘authenticity through engagement’, proposed by Guariento and Morley (2001, p.350):

Authenticity of task might be said to depend on whether or not a student is ‘engaged by the task’… Ultimately this is probably the most crucial type of authenticity, for unless a learner is somehow engaged by the task, unless they are genuinely interested in its topic and its purpose, and understand its relevance, then the other type of authenticity may count for very little.

The teachers’ comments indicate that from their perspective this engagement is social and emotional. While the psycholinguistic rationale behind tasks in task-based language teaching is to foster natural processing of language (Ellis, 2003; Samuda & Bygate, 2008; Skehan, 1998, 2003), the teachers tended to be concerned primarily with how to first engage students socio-affectively as a precondition for language use. This perception is supported by Dörnyei and Kormos (2000, p.281), who, working from learner data, view the role of task engagement in language instruction as “a prerequisite for any language processing to take place”. In the current study, the teachers developed practical theories of tasks “while they are on the job” (Kumaravadivelu, 2006a, p.172), grounded in their task experimentation, and an understanding based on experience of their EFL teaching context and learners’ interests.

The driving force behind their divergence from the textbook was teacher autonomy, a powerful and legitimate force in the implementation of any mandated approach. As Lamb (2000) comments, “teachers need to understand the constraints upon their practice but, rather than feeling disempowered, they need to empower themselves by finding the spaces and opportunities for manoeuvre” (p.128). The fact that these teachers were doing just that is illustrated by the following comment by one of the teachers in the study:

(10) Just give teachers a frame, and how this frame is decorated depends on their

viewpoints and teaching skills; it’s up to them to paint it the way they see relevant; the house is still a house; but this teacher’s house is blue, while another’s is pink …. And that’s it. (712G)

This contention captures the reality of classroom teaching in which the teachers always reshape, and re-interpret the top-down textbooks in ways consistent with problem-

solving grounded in pragmatic issues related to their particular teaching context. As another teacher said:

(11) A task lives its life in class after class,12 my task implementation is just like an experiment, if the experiment is successful, I will keep it on or otherwise, make necessary modifications or change the task. (411D)

In brief, the study has shown that the nine teachers diverged considerably from the textbook tasks in their teaching from the textbook. In particular, they chose tasks that were more open-ended and more authentic to the students. Underlying these choices made by the teachers was a commitment to find ways to engage the students socio- affectively in the tasks. The socio-affective dimension of tasks has often been overlooked in the TBLT literature and yet it was a fundamental concern to these teachers. The interface between textbook design and teacher practice in this data reflects Prahbu’s (1992) insight that “teaching becomes something of an intellectual exploration- a process of subjecting one’s theory to an operational test, and sustaining or modifying it in the light of outcomes”(p.239). In a similar vein, Kumaravadivelu (2006a) argues that, “if context-sensitive pedagogic knowledge has to emerge from teachers and their practice of everyday teaching, then they ought to be enabled to theorize from their practice and practice what they theorize” (p.173). The teachers, as we have seen, practised what they theorised and theorised what they practised. Their divergence from the textbook tasks reflects the interaction of theory and practice (Ellis, 1997, 2009b; Eraut, 1994) where the former provides ‘provisional specifications’ (Ellis, 2003, 2009c, 2012) or “can feed only indirectly into the practical knowledge that informs actual acts of teaching” (Ellis, 2009c, pp.142, italics added). It is the teachers’ pragmatic understanding of how to engage learners that counted directly in their actual practice.

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5.4 What task implementation procedures did the teachers use, and why did they